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What could be the most innovative and important book of the decade on contemporary Canadian art will be launched by its editors today in Calgary at the Trepanier Baer Gallery.
Why so important? Beyond Wilderness: The Group of Seven, Canadian Identity, and Contemporary Art (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 390 pages, $49.95) takes on a big subject, landscape art in Canada, that for decades was the bedrock of modernist culture in this country. In particular, the book addresses the most visible vehicle of the nation’s mythology, the iconic Group of Seven landscape. examines how and for whom the myths of pure wilderness and true north, brave and free, were created. It challenges the mythology and the power structures behind it and considers its many implications.
As the book’s editors, John O’Brian, a noted art historian at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and Peter White, an independent curator and writer who lives in Montreal, have devised a multifaceted lens through which to examine this fascinating area of recent art history and cultural theory.
Their brilliantly structured book, which is revolutionary in its thinking and design, is a compilation of strongly linked art works and texts by 64 artists, curators and critical writers, which the editors have identified as key moments in an evolving discussion that has reinvented the idea, or rather, diverse ideas of the Canadian landscape.
One of the book’s most innovative features is its presentation of art works and writings as equal partners in the construction of the discourse. Stand alone artists’ pages are interleaved with writings related by themes. By compiling these diverse works, created over 30 years, for the first time, Beyond Wilderness not only presents the discourse, but gives it shape.
"It was an extremely dispersed discourse," says White, a former Glenbow Museum curator and former director of both the Dunlop and the Mendel art galleries.
"In the face of this powerful idea represented by the Group of Seven, a discussion had been taking place, but it was so dispersed that it hadn’t been possible to recognize it. One of the things this book does is bring it together so that it can be seen in a way it’s never been seen before."
The questions raised go to the roots of what it means to be Canadian. For as Beyond Wilderness points out repeatedly, it is important to remember that landscape is not the product of nature, but a construction of the mind, a product of culture.
Taking up where the Group left off, Beyond Wilderness leads into the country’s social, technological, economic, political and geopolitical landscapes to present a clearer perspective on Canadian realities. Even as Tom Thomson, the Group’s forerunner, was painting pristine Canadian wilderness in Algonquin Park, the North was the site of logging, mining and industrialization.
The point, however, is not to attack the Group, who believed their job was to create a national art for an emergent modern nation, but to examine the myths and rhetoric that grew out of interpretations of their vision and its place in the formation of the national identity. It was, after all, a populist rhetoric that in fact was exclusionary — primarily that of establishment Protestant English Canada — which erased the visibility of First Nations people, women, Quebecers, immigrants and visible minorities.
Moreover, it still exerts a powerful hold on the Canadian imagination. It was supported and institutionalized by powerful friends — the National Gallery of Canada, the government, the school system, collectors and other agencies.
"Once these national images are formed in a world defined by nationhood they are very powerful."
"They circulate, and though they may be fomented by national institutions, they then are perpetuated through clubs, and organizations and advertising and all those kinds of things. They become part of popular culture and they are self-sustaining."
As a case in point, the mystical mountain peaks of Lawren Harris are now the backdrops for the slogan Absolut Seven in a famous Absolut vodka ad campaign.
"In my public school, there was a reproduction of Tom Thomson’s Northern River in the main foyer," says White, now in his early 50s, who points out that institutions and markets are very slow to change. "But in the meantime, there is this paradox that Canadians remain very powerfully attached to it, and it was to try and unravel some of the reasons that we went about doing this book. And that unravelling, that questioning, that deconstruction really does begin in the 1960s."
Parallel investigations into the role of landscape in the formation of national identity, as well as the cultural role of landscape generally, have been taking place in Great Britain and the United States. Canada, however, has not been included in the several anthologies on landscape and ideology that have been published since the 1980s. An important incentive for Beyond Wilderness was to bring Canadians into the international discussion in which they have been largely invisible.
– Nancy Tousley, The Calgary Herald, January 12, 2008
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